Daniel Allan

Dr. Allan leads the Data Engineering group within the Data Science and Systems Integration (DSSI) Program at NSLS-II. He manages a group with diverse skills and backgrounds to innovate in the areas of data management, storage, and access. They work with a shared goal of making a strong and practical impact on day-to-day scientific work at user facilities. Allan is an advocate for open source scientific software; he believes that working openly and collaboratively across instruments and facilities leads to stronger science and a more productive, dynamic, and fun working environment.

Allan is the Technical Steering Committee Chair of the Bluesky Project, a multi-facility software collaboration which leverages the scientific Python ecosystem to enable experimental science at the lab-bench scale and facility scale. Bluesky was initially developed at NSLS-II by Allan and collaborators in 2015; it is now is co-developed and used at facilities around the world. He is also the initial author of Caproto, an experiment in human-friendly distributed hardware control, which has been used at several research institutions.

The Data Engineering group is currently focused on cutting-edge data security; advancing asynchronous scanning capabilities and handling the streams of data they generate; and developing and deploying the remote data access service, Tiled.